(Sound of Blizzards, Rain of Fire, Frost Traps, Snake Traps,
Consecrates and lots and lots of belligerent orcs chopping up the
Alliance offensive as it pours into the narrow path into the keep.)

"A.F.K! They're turtling!"

This really happened the other day. Granted, it may
not be exactly
word-for-word correct, but that was the general gist of it.

Every
AV game I've played has been about the offense. We rush to
Vanndar, they rush to Drek'Thar; whoever kills 'em first wins.
But the other day was the first time I'd ever seen the Horde
turtle.

To be honest, the offensive games are a bit boring.
We take some ground, we lose a little, we take some back...
the
majority of the fighting basically boils down to running into the fray
and trying not to die really, really fast to AoE.

This time, I
randomly decided to go on defense (I tend to split it 70/30, with the
70 being me going on offense.) A scant few followed me in to
the
keep, and I dutifully set my trap and flare down and waited.
As
time went on and the Alliance forces began engaging the Horde
stragglers, taking graveyards on the way, more and more Horde started
coming to my side of the battlements.

By the time our last tower
outside the keep fell, I'd say about 25% of our forces were on defense
inside the keep itself, with most of the others fighting scattered
battles outside.

Wave after wave came at us. Rogues kept sneaking
past and trying to cap the relief hut, or take out the two towers
either side of the gate, but we kept pushing them back out.
Eventually, they forced almost the entire Horde army inside
the
gates.

For
a while, it was nail-bitingly close. I don't think we were
more
than 40 or 50 reinforcements ahead of the Alliance. And then
the
worst happened.

They summoned Ivus.

Now, I don't play a lot
of AV. I've certainly never seen the elemental dudes spawned.
So I was under the somewhat erroneous impression that Ivus
was our
guy. I rode out to see him flatten the Alliance forces.

"Oh
crap. Giant, angry tree. Run away. Very
fast.
Entire Alliance army behind him. He has a 3-stack
of
Lifebloom. We're boned."

But someone had a plan. Not,
on face value, a very good plan. "Kite him to Drek!"
This,
to me, seemed like a fairly iffy plan; wasn't that what the Alliance
was trying
to do?

But
kite him they did, with the sea of red text charging behind him.
I put down a Frost Trap; I really can't say whether it helped
or
not.

Into Drek's room he went.

And then the Alliance made a horrific mistake.

I don't know what
happened, but from where I was standing, it looked like they waltzed
into Drek's chamber and started breaking out the celebratory crackers
and cheese, patting themselves on the backs for a job well done.

They didn't appear to notice the Horde forces standing in the middle of the
room turning their healers into smears on the wall.
They just stood there while we tore them apart. And
with their healers toast, we turned on Ivus.

Incidentally, Drek makes an awesome tank for a Shammy.

And Ivus went down. All that effort, and we just
creamed him.

At
this point, the Alliance went limp. I killed a priest outside
the
keep who just stood there and took it. I think I might have
gotten a point in 1H Sword skill.

Then we rode out of the keep, took back our graveyard
thankyouverymuch, and won by a fairly considerable margin.

It was the damn longest AV I've ever been in, but it was an
absolute blast.

Sunday, 17 August 2008

No, I'm not going to be posting about the beta exclusively
from now on. This is just a result of nothing of interest [1]
happening on live this last week and a bit, while lots of interesting
things happened in the beta.

I've decided not to post much in the way of concrete details
on the beta content. I want to keep this blog relatively
spoiler-free; to the extent that instead of describing the details of a
quest or NPC conversation, I'll probably just mention the general
concept and move on. Maybe the odd landscape screenshot or
the like, but nothing really spoilery.

One aspect of that are the letters from Northrend; they let me
poke fun at the beta content without having to explicitly talk about it.

So, impressions of entering Northrend for the first time; what
can you expect on day one?

Crash, Bang, Boom!

Hopefully what you do not
experience are error dialogs telling you that the data files are
corrupted, that they cannot be repaired, and you have to sit through an
hour and a half install again.

For the eighth time.

Because that's how many times I've had to reinstall Wrath so
far; that's not even counting the times that I tried to install and had
it fail. I don't know what Blizz has done to their installer,
but it's garbage at the moment. It looks like it's not
bothering to validate that the files it installs are actually valid; so
when you get to the latest patch an hour later, you find that a random
file's been corrupted and you have to reinstall.

(Incidentally, that's what Its' "fainting" problem was a
symptom of.)

For now, I appear to have a reasonably stable install, which
is nice.

Welcome to Northrend, Here's Your Axe

The first time you step into Outland, there's a real sense
that you're not in Azeroth any more. Outland is weird and
alien; that made it exciting the first time, but nowadays the only
Outland zone I still really like is Nagrand, which is ironically the
most "normal" zone there is.

Northrend is completely different. It doesn't feel
out of place in Azeroth; Blizzard could have shoved it in next to any
existing Azeroth zones, and it would have fit right in. The
difference is that the Northrend zones feel more... polished.
More epic. Bigger and better.

Outland's zones were, I think, better designed, but suffered
from a very alien art direction. Northrend is even more
well-designed in comparison to Outland, but returns to a more classic
Warcraft art style.

It also, as I said, feels more epic. For example,
the first time I flew from Orgrimmar to Warsong Hold, I had to wonder
whether the hold had been built into the side of a massive canyon...
only to realise I was just in an utterly colossal building.
There's also the conversations with the NPCs themselves.
As your character "grows up," you are very much a nobody.
You're not a big hero like Jaina or Thrall. You're
just a freelance warrior among the multitudes.

But there are times in Northrend where the NPCs stop and say
"wow; I can't believe you really did that. You're awesome!"
When you have the leader for the Horde forces in Northrend
praise you for your efforts, organise an honour guard for you
and give you one of his wolf mounts to get you to the front lines, you
start to feel like an actual somebody.

And it's bloody fantastic.

"I seek the holy grail!"

Quests are also much better in Wrath than in either vanilla or
BC. Sure, there's still the "kill N of X, Y and Z," "gather Q
of J" and even a few dreaded "escort M back to N" quests in there.
But they feel more polished. I'm yet to come across
a quest where I groaned and felt like putting off doing it because I
could see it being a real pain.

Take the kill quests for example: normally you get something
along the following lines:

There's still a number of the "old style" there, but they tend
to be much easier to accomplish, and won't see you running around half
the zone trying to find the type of mob that, inexplicably, only spawns
about 5% of the time.

And then there are the vehicle quests. I've seen a
number of people complaining that the addition of vehicles is going to
turn WoW into a glorified online Halo clone, but it's simply not true.
Do you know what the first "vehicle" I encountered was?

A horse.

Seriously; there's a quest to steal yourself a horsie.
You go up to it, and it has the "enter vehicle" cursor on it.
You click on it, and your character jumps on (quite
literally,
I might add; you don't just appear on its back in a puff of smoke) and
you ride off with it.

Really, the vehicle system is just a way for Blizzard to make
it so that you can hop on or into some other object in the world, be it
a mount, a vehicle or a structure, and use special abilities that apply
to just that object.

And unlike the bombing quests from BC, each of the vehicle
quests thus far has been different. I've ridden on the back
of
a stolen horse, driven around a field of battle on a tank, flown on a
wyrm, and manned a static gun emplacement.

I also want to go out on a tangent briefly in order to
highlight a
moment from Wrath. This has very light spoilers
in it, so I'm hiding it in a little spoiler box. If you want
to see it, click in the box (you'll need JavaScript enabled) or simply
disable styling on this page.

The following content
contains spoilers and
has been hidden. To view it, enable JavaScript or disable styles for
this
page.

You're down on the beach near a small outpost with a scant few
tents. A much larger outpost lies just up the coast, shrouded
in mist. The place looks completely abandoned, and you're
told that it was attacked by some nameless force. The Tuskarr
near one tent seems reluctant to name the attackers, apparently out of
fear that invoking their name will summon them.

You are tasked with getting back some of his possessions, as
well as the standard death and destruction that goes with attempting to
recover any outpost.

But before you go, they tell you to be careful: they've
already sent a number of people into the mist... and none have returned.

So I'm standing there, thinking that this is just a load of
rubbish. Thanks to my goggles with built-in zoom feature, as
well as Eagle Eye, I know the place is deserted. Maybe
there's some sort of debuff for entering the mist?

Ah, who cares?! I run forward, figuring on just
running around to grab the quest items and...

...and then my vision narrows, the corners of the screen
whiten out, and the NPCs disappear from sight. Everything
goes slightly foggy and then I see... something moving in the mist.
What the...

I back out of the mist; the NPCs return, and whatever was in
the mist disappears. OK, so Blizz is trying to mess with me,
are they?

I head back into the mist, and carefully make my way in to
meet the enemy...

I have to say that whilst not the most original idea ever, the
execution of this particular enemy species is exceptionally well
done; especially with the spooky atmosphere!

So those of you out there who love questing, I think you're
going to be very happy with Wrath.

Lowbie Tanking Ninja Turtle

Another thing I can't help but have noticed are the changes to
Hunter pets. I won't go into excruciating detail on these
right now, but I wanted to get this out:

My turtle is not only usable, but arguably a better levelling
pet than my cat.

Here's the thing: back in vanilla and BC, turtles sucked.
Yes, they had excellent mitigation, but that couldn't offset
their laughable damage output and threat generation. They
basically couldn't hold aggro off a baby kitten.

They couldn't tank in instances, they couldn't out-dps a fairy
with a slightly damp tissue, and no one ever seemed to sell food they
would eat.

Which is probably why Bisque ended up falling about 20 levels
behind.

However, with the changes to Hunter pets in Wrath, Bisque is
now a better levelling pet than Tiddles for one simple reason:

I can't pull aggro off him.

And he's two
levels below me.

Tiddles' threat generation is more or less on-par with what he
currently does, maybe a bit higher. But Bisque's is through
the roof. Unless Wrath has bugged out and re-enabled Cower
again (oh, how I hate that) or I've started going all-out before
he got the first hit in, it's really hard for me to pull aggro.
The little guy just keeps on truckin'!

And he's got a lot of awesome toys now: a taunt, intercept and
of course his shield. Tiddles still blows Bisque out of the
water in terms of damage output, but Bisque can now actually hold a
mob's attention.

As I said, Tiddles is still pretty much still Tiddles.

There have been a few major changes to my Dragonhawk, Smaug.
He now has a focus dump, so he does decent DPS.
Fire Breath still makes me a little nervous in crowded areas,
but he seems to make a pretty decent levelling pet.

Replacing Skill With Button-Mashing

And then there's the Steady Shot change. Let me just
say first off that it had
to be made. Hunters were penalised more than any other class
based on their network latency. But manually weaving my shots
was part of what made being a Hunter exciting for me; knowing that
I had to actually get my timing right to maximise my DPS.

And before you say it, no
a macro would not have worked just as well. Using a macro led
to a 10% loss
in DPS; please leave your raving zealotry at the door.

But with this change, Hunter DPS really does just boil down to
"mash X until it's dead." I know Blizzard isn't finished with
our class yet, but I really hope they come up with some way of
complicating our DPS that doesn't depend on network conditions or some
other factor outside our control.

On the whole, Wrath looks to be shaping up really nicely.
Blizzard are clearly raising their own bar on this one,
improving (even if in just a small way) on pretty much every aspect of
the game.

Also, if you have any questions about Wrath, feel free to ask
them, and I'll do my best to answer them.

[1] I didn't think a Kara run that got called on
Moroes, a Gruul's run I didn't go on and farming Mudfish for a few
hours qualified as "interesting." :P

Thursday, 14 August 2008

Well, I seem to have landed up in the
less-entirely-hospitable-than-I-would-have-liked continent of
Northrend. You see, I was approached by some representatives
of our mighty Warchief Thrall, who asked me if I would be willing to
participate in a little scouting "expedition."

The
first warning sign should have been the way they said "expedition,"
complete with air-quotes. They do not appear terribly
accustomed to
subterfuge. In any event, they made their case and I agreed.

Also,
they gave me sandwiches. Really nice ones with pork and just
enough
gravy so's you can taste it, but not so much that the bread goes all
soggy.

The zeppelin ride over was largely uneventful, apart from
when a gang of pirates attempted to board us. This did not
go so well
for them considering that we were in a zeppelin and they in a boat.
But I must give the Bloodsail Buccaneers credit for
enthusiasm, if not for deductive reasoning.

After several hours of flying north, we arrived at the
Forsaken port of Vengeance Landing in the Howling Fjord. Various
persons had
informed me that this place represented the first look at the
Forsaken's own style of architecture, and thus was an
important milestone in their cultural development.

However, I cannot help but think that they did not design
their buildings with conventional properties such as structural
integrity or aesthetics in mind. It appears they designed
each structure to provide the maximal electrical conductivity. One
cannot walk from one end of the settlement to the other without having
to comb one's hair.

Upon arriving, I noted that Tiddles' fur was standing on-end.
At first, I surmised that he must have detected the odiferous
scent of cheese nearby, for you surely remember Tiddles'... aversion to
cheese.

I changed my theory when his tail
spontaneously caught fire. He now refuses to go anywhere near
the town lest he combust again.

Sadly,
I am yet to go out into the wilds and assess the situation here.
There appears to be a problem of some kind whereby any time I
attempt to walk south of Vengeance Landing, I suddenly pass out and
wake up later back at the town.

Last time it happened, I woke up with a damn pencil stuck up
my nose! Personally, I suspect those bloody apothecaries; they're
always
up to no good.

In
any event, I shall make sure to write to you both again when I have
more to say. If the fainting issue cannot be adequately
resolved,
I shall likely go to Borean Tundra and try my luck there.

Friday, 8 August 2008

Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Big
Bear Butt recently
posted
about how there's an awful lot of content out there in vanilla WoW that
most players haven't seen before. Every time I log on, I see
people complaining about how they're bored, and that Blizzard needs to
hurry up with Wrath because there's nothing to do.

To
paraphrase BBB: rubbish.

A
few weeks back, as I said previously, I joined OathBound.
Within
60 seconds of being invited in, I was asked if I wanted to come to ZG.
Yes, Zul'Gurub; the guild was having a fun-run. ZG
was one
of the few raid instances I'd done back in vanilla WoW, so it wasn't
like I hadn't done a few full clears. And it's not like
there's
much of anything you can get from ZG that's still useful at 70.

But
I went along, and I had a blast. I can't describe how good it
felt to not just one-shot Bloodlord Mandokir, but to completely destroy
him. Fighting Hakkar again was great fun, and I even got to
kill
Gahz'ranka, who I had never seen before.

The week
after, the
guild was in Molten Core. We only got as far as Baron Geddon
before calling it, but again it was just so enjoyable to run around
tearing these once-feared bosses to ribbons. I remember
having to
decurse the Lucifron fight on my druid. On dialup.
Without
Decursive. Needless to say, it's a hell of a lot more
entertaining when you're just in charge of bringing the pew-pew.

And
this week, the guild headed over to the Dread Citadel itself.
Unfortunately, it didn't go so well. The major
issue seemed to be a lack of people. With no upgrades for
them, most didn't seem interested in coming.

I
was absent for an entirely different reason: I'd reached my broadband
quota a few days earlier, and was speed-capped. Which means
that
while I can do just fine on a Kara run, I was disconnected inside
Naxxramas within 10 seconds; instantly if someone entered combat.

I'd
really love to see Naxx. And BWL. And AQ.
All the
places and fights I never got to see back before BC. I
suppose I
find it hard to understand how someone can invest time into this game
and not want to see and do as much as they can.

Sure,
there's no
upgrades to be had from MC or Naxx. But those pieces of gear
that
drop out of BT or Sunwell; the ones you covet so much... WotLK is going
to make those obsolete. You'll be back at the bottom of the
food chain again. If all you get out of playing WoW is better
gear, then you'll have nothing to show for all that effort.

On
the other hand, I'm coming away with something worth far more;
something you won't find on any loot table: memories and fun.

Sunday, 3 August 2008

So, I was just standing there when a spaceship full of Fire
Bears flew
down and abducted the 'e' key from my keyboard. Unable to
form a
complete, correctly-spelled sentence, I was left unable to blog until I
was able to order a replacement in from Norway (where they grow
keyboard keys in large underground caves.)

Ok, yes, I would. Great big whoppers, at that.
But at least you can always tell when I'm
making stuff up!

Not at all suddenly changing the subject:

Two
weeks ago, I finally changed guilds. The old guild,
<Fury>
was more or less a social levelling guild that had kinda fallen apart
as the higher-level members started moving over to raiding guilds.
I'd stayed there because I wasn't sure whether I was going to
be
transferring Its to another server soon or not. In the end, I
decided to stay and applied to <OathBound>.

A few days of waiting, a few quick questions online, and I had
a new tag.

A
week ago, I got in to my first Karazhan run. As in, ever.
Despite getting my first toon to 70 within a few weeks of
BC's
launch, I never ended up raiding for a variety of reasons. It
was
a huge thrill to head in there for the first time and see all these
bosses that I'd read about and seen in videos.

And I only died a few times!

It
was quite fun; even when we got to Opera and the rest of the group said
we were going to do the "hunter thing" as a form of "initiation."
Luckily, the event was Big Bad Wolf, so I didn't die and I
got to
laugh at their failed attempt to get me killed.

As for the
bosses, we managed to two shot Big Bad Wolf (on the first
attempt, the order of Little Red Ridinghooding went Main Tank, Off
Tank, Main Healer, Other Healer, One Of The Tanks Again which made
things somewhat unstable.) We had to take four tries at Aran
[1] before he went down, and a bad infernal drop combined with
marginally
inaccurate positioning caused us to wipe once on Prince.
Aside
from the optional bosses (which we didn't end up having time for,) we
one-shot everything else.

The other hunter was a troll, and was holding out for a bow,
so I ended up getting it. I'm still adjusting to the change
in
weapon speeds; I went from a 1.74s shot rotation to a ~2.0s shot
rotation, so I still hit Steady Shot slightly too early some times.

(In the interests of full disclosure, those meters are from
Curator on.)

Damage meters aren't everything; but to get up there on my
first run with "crappy" blues... I'm a happy little hunter.

(Incidentally,
there was going to be a funny picture of Its posing with the Wolfslayer
Sniper Rifle, and Tiddles thinking about how Its is probably just
compensating for something... except WoW Model Viewer doesn't seem to
like my new machine. You'll just have to imagine it on your
own.)

And no, I didn't move during flame
wreath! ... I just got caught in the blizzard repeatedly...

Saturday, 19 July 2008

So, you might have noticed a little bit of hubub in the last
day or so when Blizzard lifted the NDA, kicked off the open beta of
WotLK, and information started pouring out.

Happily, we've finally gotten a look at what new talents and
abilities Hunters will have come WotLK. Since it seems to be
the "hip" thing to be doing right now, here's my take on some of the
changes:

Being Talented

Master's Call [NYI]

Rank 1/1

7% of base mana

40 yd range

Instant cast

1 min cooldown

Your pet
attempts to remove all stun and movement impairing effects on the
target, and cause them to be immune to all effects for 4 sec.

This apparently is replacing Animal Handler. For the
life of me, I cannot
see how Blizzard is going to rationalise this. I mean, it's
cool and all, but how exactly does an animal make someone immune to movement
impairing effects?

Perhaps it's best not to ask...

Cobra Strikes

Rank 3/3

You have a 60%
chance when you critically hit with Arcane Shot, Steady Shot or Kill
Shot to cause your pet's next 3 special attacks to critically hit.

I find this interesting since it basically increases your
pet's ability to keep Frenzy up (heck; maybe we could drop another
point from it!) But by itself, it's not that incredible.
That's why I want to pair it with:

Invigoration

Rank 2/2

When your pet
scores a critical hit with a special ability, you instantly regenerate
2% mana.

Let's do a little light theorycrafting. Currently, I
have ~20% crit, and an attack speed of 1.74 seconds.
Averaging that out, that means I'm hitting a target ~1.15
times a second with a 1:1 rotation. Taking a 20% crit rate,
that's 0.23 crits per
second. Which is 0.14 Cobra Strike procs per second.
Now, let's assume that Cobra Strikes doesn't proc again until
our
pet has gotten his three specials off. We'll also assume we
have a focus dump, and that we can supply him with enough focus to keep
using it.

Combined with 2/2 Invigoration, three crits per Cobra Strikes
proc, 0.14 procs per second and a base of 6200 mana, that's:

~0.14 procs per second × 3
crits per proc × (2% of 6200 mana) per crit = ~51 mana per
second

That's about 256
MP5.
You'd need to be able to supply
your pet with 17 focus per second; according to Cheeky's spreadsheet,
I'm currently at 24 focus per second.
What's interesting is that also according to Cheeky's, I use
69
mana per second during my 1:1 rotation, which is about 347 MP5.
Let's switch on Viper, which gives me (in the average case) 87
MP5. That means if I got just 4 MP5 from other sources, I'd
never
actually run out of mana...

Beast Mastery [NYI]

Rank 1/1

You master the
art of Beast Training, teaching you the ability to tame Exotic pets and
increasing your total amount of Pet Skill Points by 5.

This, right here, is huge. Let's deal with the
second half first.

... increasing your total amount of Pet Skill Points
by 5.

For those that aren't aware, loyalty and the Training Point
system is being thrown out for a simpler talent-like system.
Starting at level 20, pets will get one Skill Point every
four levels to spend in their talent tree (each pet family has access
to one of the three pet talent trees that will be available.)
That makes for a total of 16 points at level 80 (not 15 as
most people seem to think; they're forgetting the point you get at
level 80.)

This means that BM hunters will have access to 21 points.
But there obviously has to be somewhere to spend those
points. Additionally, I don't think Blizzard will have the
talent trees set up in such a way that allows BM hunters to completely
max their pet out, so we can probably assume that pet talent trees will
have at least 26, maybe 31 points you can potentially spend in them.
The only question now is whether this will allow BM hunters
to "back-fill" their pets' talents, or go deeper into the tree into
some 21-point über talents.

The other half is also really interesting. As you
should be aware, there are various beasts that are simply not tameable
by hunters. For example, there is no tameable basilisk or
mana wyrm in the game, despite these being beasts.

Some have speculated that this will allow hunters to tame any mob categorised
as a "beast," but I don't think that's likely. For example,
Marsh Walkers are beasts. Now, having one of those as a pet
would be so far off the "awesome scale" that we'd have to get a rocket
scientist in to figure out where the needle went, but I really doubt
Blizzard would allow it.

Also, notice how "Exotic" is capitalised; that makes it a
proper noun which suggests that instead of the current "Tameable/Not
Tameable" status of beasts, it'll become "Tameable/Not Tameable/Exotic."

None the less, whether or not this is as awesome as it sounds
depends entirely on what pets Blizzard makes Exotic. Remember
that in the new system, every pet will have access to a particular
talent tree and
a family-unique ability. Some ideas that spring to mind:

Basilisks:
tanking tree, Hypnotic
Gaze ability. Depending on how long the gaze
ability works, you could even make Basilisks utility pets, and have
them as a form of temporary, emergency CC.

Hyppogryphs:
dps tree, Wing
Flap ability, or maybe Swoop.
And tanks think wind serpents are bad! These could
actually be pretty horrible (for the opposing team) in PvP; you could
use them to knock players away from yourself if they get too close (or
to throw defenders off the cliff at the Lumber Mill or the bridge in
AV...) Or if they had swoop, it'd give BM hunters a
semi-frequent spell interrupt.

Mana
Wyrms: utility tree, Mana Burn
ability. Yes, a mana-drain pet. Just imagine the
QQing that would result from caster arena teams...

There actually aren't that many pet families that aren't
already tameable and aren't obviously ridiculous. But who
knows; maybe there'll be some utterly awesome pets in Northrend that
only BM hunters can tame!

(Of course, it could also be pointless where all the Exotic
pets are inferior to regular pets in every respect, but let's not be too negative!)

Careful Aim

Rank 3/3

Increases your
ranged attack power by an amount equal to 100% of your total Intellect.

That's pretty interesting; being in the second tier of
Marksmanship, it'll allow hunters to stack a bit more Intellect.
The problem is that in terms of stats, Intellect "costs"
twice as
much as Attack Power. For example, for any gem that gives you
+8
Intellect, you could have gotten a gem of the same quality with +16
Attack Power. Still, even if you don't stack more Intellect,
it's
an extra few hundred AP.

Improved Tracking [NYI]

Rank 5/5

Increases all
damage done to targets that are being tracked 5%.

This is exactly eight kinds of awesome. That's how
many things we can track. It basically boils down to a flat
5% increase in all damage on everything except things that are
invisible (which we can't really shoot anyway,) and unclassified things
like bugs.

Even better, it's a first
tier talent in Survival. I'm seriously
considering dropping Aimed Shot and Rapid Killing to get this puppy...

There are more talents than the above, but they're the ones
that interest me as a BM-centric hunter. If you want to play
around with them, MMO Champion have a hunter
talent calculator.

L33t Pet Skillz

As I said before, pets are now moving on to a talent-like
system. In addition to the three talent trees (DPS, tanking
and "utility,") there is also going to be one family-specific ability
for each family. Thanks to Wowhead's WotLK subsite,
I've managed to put together a list of all known family-specific pet
abilities:

Bad
Attitude - there's
no apparent limit to the number of times this can happen, so I suspect
this is going to work as reactive damage. Combined with
Crocolisk's +10% bonus to armor, could Blizz be intending them to be
the AoE tanking pet?

Dust
Cloud
- This looks to be a pretty powerful debuff, exclusive to Tallstriders.
Averaged out, it works out to be a 12% reduction in chance to
hit.

Nether
Shock
- Can you say "tactical deprivation of heals in arena?" Sure,
I
knew you could. At least now Nether Rays are useful!

Pin
- Well, it's
got a crab for an icon, so I assume this is what crabs are getting.
It's interesting; a combined root and dot that also roots the
pet. This could make for an interesting tanking ability for
saving squishies and stopping runners.

Ravage
- Being able to stun with your Ravager would be great for saving
squishies or just legging it. Sadly, this also means that
Ravagers lose Gore. But then, I've never been fond of the
Spiky
Nightmare Clowns, so I'm not terribly fussed.

Savage
Rend
- One of my mum's hunters has a pet raptor. Named "Wally."
I just can't stop laughing at the thought of something being
torn
apart by a vicious raptor named Wally.

Serenity
Dust - Something to note about this one. It says
"moth" in the tooltip. We can't tame moths.
Well, I guess come WotLK we will
be able to tame them (although whether they'll be "Exotic" or not
remains to be seen.) Aside from that, it's a pretty amazing
buff; +10%
AP and a 2415 HoT once every 2 minutes. I'm not sure where
this will
place moths in terms of being a tanking/grinding/raiding pet though.

Snatch
- First of all, I can see this really
annoying rogues. This is a good thing. This is for
owls, so this should make Tux (and Pike)
happy. Owls get this in exchange for losing Screech; though
you
can sort of think of this as a single-target version of screech...

Sonic
Blast -
Basically Ravage, except it does slightly less damage, it does nature
damage instead of (presumably) physical damage, and it's icon is a bat
as opposed to a gaping, blood-soaked maw. Since there aren't
any hedgehogs in WoW, I suppose this must be for bats.

Spore
Cloud - Only
does 6 DPS, but I suspect the 700 armor reduction is more the point.
It's also fairly obvious that this is for Spore Bats; this
will make
them pretty damned effective against casters.

Swipe
- Aside from being another
ability starting with "s," this is the family ability for Bears.
They're like baby durids!

Tendon
Rip
- Pretty simple snare; likely to be popular in PvP since the pet could
potentially keep it up 30% of the time. Pity it's only
available
on Hyenas...

If I haven't mentioned a pet family, it's because it's ability
is already in-game. It looks like we're going to have way more choices
for viable pets come WotLK. It's also worth mentioning
that every
pet has either Dash
or Dive,
as well as one of Bite,
Claw
or Smack.

That said, Wowhead has a number of other pet abilities in
their WotLK database that aren't family-exclusive:

Bullheaded
- After having Tiddles get netted by those bloody Sunfury Archers, I
say: bring it on!

Call
of the Wild - Sadly, nothing to do with making the target run
around trying to find a bathroom...

Carrion
Feeder - Man, and I thought Cannibalise was nasty...
I mean, the health is one thing, but regenerating happiness?!
Just imagine this in PvP, though...

Charge
- Strangely, what used to be the defining ability of boars is now
available to Cats, Hyenas, Raptors, Tallstriders and Wolves... but not
boars. Poor piggies are being hit with the nerf bat pretty
hard
lately...

Dying
Bite - This is the last
thing you need to be worried about if you've killed my pet.

Heart
of the Phoenix - One thing BRK
has advocated before is putting points into Improved Revive Pet for
high-end raiding, since losing your pet early in the fight translates
to a 30% drop in DPS. This may make that unnecessary.

Intervene
- I'm sorry; I just can't take this ability seriously when it's using a
picture of a turtle.

Kill
Shot
- For comparison, under normal circumstances, this does less damage
(both over time and per mana) than Arcane Shot, on the same cooldown.
Against wounded
targets, it does way
more damage and becomes incredibly mana-efficient. Awesome.

So
that's about it for mechanical changes to our class thus far.
That said, there might still be a few surprises down the line
for
us considering that Hunters were one of the last classes to be worked
on. Only time will tell, but right now things are looking
pretty
good.

Wednesday, 16 July 2008

Update:
a few minutes after
publishing this, I found a pretty nasty mistake in the spreadsheet's
workings. Basically, I was taking the difference between the
base
armor/resistance mitigation and the full mitigation in the wrong place,
throwing the results way off. I've re-written my conclusions
appropriately. This is why one shouldn't be theorycrafting at
6AM, even when suffering from extreme insomnia.

It's
a bit like going into a quaint little bakery in a small town, and
asking of the proprietor the contents of his pies. He then
launches into an in-depth exposition on the low-level chemical
composition of the pies, what particular local supplier he purchased
the meat from, etc.

And then you say, "that's all well and good, but what do they
taste like?"

The baker replies: "I have no idea."

This is not, on the whole, desperately helpful.

This
looks like a job for theorycrafting! After a number of hours
of
fiddling randomly with a spreadsheet, as well as referring to Petopia
[1], I came up with the Pet
Calculator. This should work in pretty much
everything except Microsoft Office; if you're using that, you might
want to try the OpenDocument
Format plugin. If there's demand, I'll try to rig
up something for the Excel users, but without a copy of Excel, there's
only so much I can do.

Before
I go further, I just want to point out that the working in this
spreadsheet could be, and the first time I published this was,
wrong. That said, I've now double-checked it a few more
times,
gone over my reasoning again, and can't see anything obviously wrong
with it. If you do
find something wrong or just suspicious, please let me know.

Usage is pretty simple: on the first sheet, you plug in the
various bits of information it demands of you like so:

These
are the details for Tiddles and myself. You just need to edit
the
non-bold cells to match you and your pet's stats. Once you've
told the spreadsheet all this, it will update the output section with
the results.

The
first two, "Pet Health" and "Pet Armor" should be pretty close to
what's reported in-game. I've seen a few points difference
here
and there, but it's possible that it's just rounding differences.

"Effective Health" is talking about how much actual damage your
pet can take, after taking armor and magical resistances into account,
before going to the big stable in the sky.

"Absorption
contribution" tells you how much of that effective health each of the
Greater Stamina, Natural Armor and Resistance pet talents are
responsible for. For stamina, this is just done by applying
all
the various modifiers to the stamina granted by Great Stamina and then
converting it into health.

Armor
and magical resistance is a little trickier: these are computed by
working out the effective health (including base armor, armor and
resistance from the hunter, etc.) followed by the effective health
assuming we didn't
have
any points in Natural Armor of one of the resistance talents.
We
subtract the latter from the former, and this gives us the extra
absorption spending those points give us. It's important to
do it
like this because the benefit provided by armor and resistances aren't
linear; computing them by themselves would give an inflated result.

Finally, "Absorption per point" just takes the
absorption contribution and divides through by the number of training
points you spent on that talent. In this case, we can see
that
magical resistances are incredibly
point-efficient compared to stamina and armor, by a full order of
magnitude in the case of the former.

This lets you play around with theoretical set-ups; for
example, investing 150 TP into Greater Stamina will give you just over
half the absorption that those same points in Natural Armor would have
given you. But of course, that's only in the case of physical
damage.

Magical Resistance is also interesting. Rank 5 of
any magical
resistance will give you almost four times the absorption of stamina,
at just under half the point cost.

That said, the resistance
talents seem to give the biggest bang for the buck. Taking a
Sporebat as an example, max ranks of Stamina and Armor only provide 5%
and 8% of the final absorption respectively. That said, with
rank 11 of Great Stamina, max rank Magical Resistance provides a
whopping 30% of the final absorption.

Now, generalisations are always
bad, and you should take your own circumstances into account, but it
seems that in general:

Natural
Armor is better mitigation for the points than Great Stamina is,
assuming you're only interested in physical damage. That
said,
since the amount of absorption armor gives is relative to the amount of
health you have, Great Stamina actually increases the
effectiveness of Natural Armor. Might be interesting to set
up a graph of the two...

That said, choosing to put points in one or the other exclusively,
Stamina and Armor end up being about the same effective health for
physical damage, but with Stamina also boosting your effective health
against magical damage.

Irrespective of that, Magical Resistance blows them both
out of the water and
into orbit.

So
there you go. Plug your pet and yourself in and see what
happens.
If you're looking to max out your pet's health, and just want
numbers to plug into the pet training window without having to read all
of that pesky text; assuming a baseline pet (like a Sporebat) with
max-rank Bite or Claw, Rank 2 Avoidance and Rank 1 Cobra Reflexes plus
15 TP spent on a family-specific talent (leaving 266 TP to play with):

Rank 11 Great Stamina and Rank 5 Natural Armor seems to
give the best physical absorption.

Rank 9 Great Stamina and Rank 5 Magical Resistance seems
to give the best magical absorption.

If you want a bit of both, you'll just have to decide for
yourself.

Again, if you spot anything wrong with this post or the
spreadsheet, let me know.

Some
have claimed that Wowhead's introduction of pet comparison tables, pet
talent calculators, etc. have made Petopia obsolete. This is
complete rubbish; where, pray tell is Wowhead's detailed tables of base
pet statistics, or their pages on the formulae underpinning hunter pet
health and armor?

Don't get me wrong: the new Wowhead stuff is very
cool. They've got the best pet talent calculator I've seen,
and
the tables are much easier to use than static ones on Petopia.
But Petopia is still t3h awesome.

Tuesday, 15 July 2008

Originally, I was going to do this post using an awesome interactive
SVG that you could zoom in on, and you could mouse-over any UI element
to see a tooltip of what it was, why it was there, and a link to
download it.

Except that, despite being a seven year old standard,
IE still doesn't support it. Instead they'd rather support
their proprietary WPF format, which is almost the same thing.
I hate Microsoft so very much at times.

For the love of all that's good and fuzzy, please stop using
IE. You're making the web developers cry.

Anyway, enough politics. Here's my UI in all its
needlessly complicated glory; note that if you see a little
WowAce
icon, it
means that
addon can be updated with the WowAce
Updater (which, rather depressingly, requires Internet
Explorer to install unless
you want to be tricksy, but... no, not going off on a
tangent!)
On
to the UI!

This is my Outfitter
bar. It lists various outfits that I can switch between by
clicking on the appropriate icon. Shown on the bar at the
moment
are two primary sets: "Birthday suit" and Normal. The
remaining
icons are for "accessory sets" which simply change certain slots and
don't define a complete set. These are my fishing, grinding,
max-dps, fire festival, parachute and raiding sets.

This is the quest tracker provided by QuestsFu, which is
part of
FuBar
3.0.
I hate this quest. So
very much. It takes hours upon hours to complete, and you get
a
stupid rejuvenation potion for your trouble. Why do I even
bother
with that thing?

This is a neat addon called
Nudge.
Basically, if
I'm out of range it's red, if I'm in range it's blue
and if I'm in melee range it's green. I've made it
exceedingly
wide so that I can always catch the colour in my peripheral vision.

These
are my item cooldowns, provided by
Cooldown
Timers 2. These
bars
aren't in this spot any more; they're over by #5; I just haven't taken
a new screenshot since then.

This is
Elkano's
BuffBars.
What's cool about this is that, although you can't see it
here,
you can filter different buffs/debuffs into different groups.
Each group can then either be free-floating, or anchored to
another group. Above the list of buffs is a (presently) empty
Paladin block that shows up all the various Paladin auras, blessings
and seals.

Let this be a lesson in always making sure you make
changes in the right profile, or your hunter will end up with a
Paladin-centric buff display. Oh well.

Again, this is Cooldown Timers 2, this time showing my
ability cooldowns.
Of course, the main point of this is to show how long until
your
traps are ready (which you can't see here since I didn't drop one.)

This
message is generated by
TopScore Fu. The addon keeps track of
your highest damage (and/or healing) records with individual abilities
and overall, with and without crits. But it also does
something way
cooler: it can be configured to take a screenshot when you get a new
record.

Why
is this so awesome? Because you'll end up with a massive
collection of screenshots documenting your character's progress in the
game. It's awesome to be able to go back years and reminisce.

Here be
Quartz.
The main bar is the cast bar (with the red area denoting what
my
current latency to the server is,) the red "blip" above that is my GCD
timer, and the white bar above that
is my autoshot timer.

And
before anyone mentions it, yes the cast bar was pasted in from another
screenshot, since you'd be surprised how hard it is to get all
of this crap on-screen at once...

This
is Kharthus'
Hunter Timers [1]. This shows the duration of
things. The real draw card for this is that it shows you how
long
you have left on your traps before they disappear, and how long until a
trap's effect wears off.

My primary unit frames are taken care of with
PitBull.
The middle two are fairly obvious: myself and my target.
To the left is my pet and my pet's target, above that is my
focus
and my focus' target and to the right is my target's target and
target's target's target. Above and to the right, which isn't
visible in this shot, is the unit under my mouse cursor, and their
target.

What is this excessive of which you
speak?

My
party and raid frames are done with
Grid.
I used to have
larger
frames until I realised that I didn't really need them. In
this
particular case, I've got Grid along with Grid Mana Bars. The
little red dot in the upper-left corner of K's frame denotes that he
has aggro. Since he has a rage bar, this is a good thing.

The experience bar (or in this case, reputation bar) is
courtesy of Trinity XP (part of Trinity
Bars 2.)

The
bottom area of the screen is carved out and given a little sprucing up
thanks to Sunn
Art. Specifically, I'm using the Tribal
texture
(which is part of the base Sunn Art package, although there are a
number of additional art packs.) I love this texture because
of
the gilded golden border at the top which is just right for
fitting my XP/reputation bar into it.

As
far as I'm aware, all of the various chat modifications I have are done
by
Chatter.
Except for blacking out the names: that's done in
an
image editor. :P

Mah pet bar, thanks to Trinity Bars 2.

Mah
main action bar, again thanks to Trinity Bars 2. This is more
complex than it first appears. If you look carefully at the
letters on the buttons, you'll see they read:

1, 2, 3, 4, R, F, V, C,
X, Z, -, =

Now,
imagine you've got your fingers resting on the normal WASD movement
keys. Ignoring the last two, look at where those keys are:
they're the keys that wrap around the movement keys. This
means I
can hit any action on that bar (except for food and drink) without
moving my left hand.

But there's more: there's a second, separate
set of actions bound to those keys plus the Ctrl modifier. If
you
count the pet bar (which is bound to Ctrl+Shift+[1..Z]) I can hit any
one of 30 actions without moving my hand at all.

What's more, most of those actions are themselves macros
that have different behaviours. For example, 2 is a
macro that fires Serpent Sting normally, or Scorpid Sting if I hold
down Alt. F doubles as both regular Arcane Shot and my
pull-shot. I think the only one that isn't a macro of
some kind is Multishot, and that's only because I've never needed
Tranquilizing Shot, nor do I have any macro slots left...

And people wonder how I run circles around them while
smacking
them with instant shots and stings while micromanaging my pet...

This here be
FuBar
3.0. The modules (all of which are, as far as I
know, available on the WowAce Updater) you can see,
from left to right, are:

MoneyDetailFu — tracks where my money is coming from
and where it's going.

MoneyFu — tracks how much money I have on each and all
of my toons.

Omen — surely you know what this is, right?

Grid — just another way to access Grid's configuration.

Cooldown Timers 2 — one of the few ways to access
CDT's configuration.

Visual Themes — ditto.

Skinner — as above.

ToFu — actually redundant with Quartz, shows how long
left on a flight. A.k.a. the "can I make a coffee in time"
timer.

LocationFu — GPS for WoW.

DurabilityFu — now you have no excuse to turn
up with damaged gear. Well, except for the "I'm a dipstick"
one.

AmmoFu — can haz boolets?

SpeedFu — surprisingly, this actually has a legitimate
use: working out if your flying mount is level or not!

GarbageFu — firstly, it shows a list of all vendor
trash in my bags when moused over, as well as their individual and
total value. But that's not the best part: if I Shift+Click
on the icon, it will drop the contents of the least valuable
inventory slot. This way, you can minimise your losses when
you run out of bag space.

SunnArt — see #13.

FishingBuddyFu — honestly don't use this much, since
typing /fb is faster, and the rest of Fishing
Buddy is mostly automatic.

DPS — don't really use this either since I have #26...

TopScoreFu — see #7.

QuestFu — see #2.

BagFu — tells me how many slots I have left before I
have to drop my partial stack of Malfunctioning Basilisk Livers.
The horror!

RestFu — shows rested XP on my army of alts.

ExperienceFu — good for estimating how long until I
level on an alt. Also used for figuring out how long the
elves around the mana-forge have been studiously not dropping those
bloody plans. Stingy bastards...

Elkano's BuffBars — configuration for #5.

ClearFont2 — basically does a bunch of font
substitution jiggery-pokery to make text in-game nicer to read.

ClockFu — lets me know how long ago I was supposed to
have gone to bed. Bad Its!

What a surprise: more Trinity Bars 2! This set
of three columns map to my Logitech G15's
G keys. The original, blue-backlit one, not the "I'm going to
have to kill someone for this" crappy orange version.
Specifically, each column is a different mode's worth of G
keys. The actual binding itself and stylish red border
showing the active mode are done using Its'
G15 Binder.

Modes 1 and 2 contains various things that doesn't
actually get used all that often and mode 2 is the one I'm generally
in. Specifically, since G13-G18 can be reached with my pinky
finger without having to move my left hand too much, it tends to
contain the most oft-used things. Most notable are my "God
Mode" macro on G13, bandages on G16, my Zapthrottle Mote Extractor on
G17 and my I Has Macro Lol macro on G18.

It's another
Trinity Bars 2 button! This is my "panic" button; it's bound
to numpad 0, which is nice and big, and very easy to hit with my right
thumb.

This is in two parts. The upper row of buttons
are my "quick" buttons. Various things that I need quick
access to, but don't want to hit by mistake. From left to
right, they are my mount macro, my pet control macro (combining Mend
Pet, Call Pet and Revive Pet,) my gadget macro, my über trap macro and
my powerup macro.

The bottom row is basically the "stance" bar from Trinity
Bars 2 that depends on my class. For my hunter it's aspects,
for a paladin it's auras and for a druid it's forms. It's not
actually bound to anything for Its, but for non-pet classes, this bar
takes over the Ctrl+Shift+[1..Z] bindings.

Amazingly, these two buttons aren't from Trinity
Bars 2! In fact, it's TrinketMenu.
If I mouse
over the buttons, I can switch out trinkets with the left and right
mouse buttons. The buttons are also bound to Shift+5 and
Ctrl+5, which activates the trinket in that slot.

Well, that didn't last long: it's back to Trinity!
The left one is a pop-up bar; mouse over the hammer, and a
vertical bar of professions shows up. Saves a hell of a lot
of space, that's for sure. Other uses include Paladin seals,
or Shammy totems. The bag button, unsurprisingly, opens my
bags.

Omen.
If you don't have this, and you ever group with
other people, you should hang your head in shame.

And now for the other things you can't see.

ArkInventory:
this thing is a God-send. Here's a
screenie so you know what I'm yammering on about:

Basically, it pools all your storage into a single bag.
You then create a bunch of groups. To each group
you assign one or more categories or rules. AI (ArkInventory,
not Artificial Intelligence) will then sort your items into those
groups for you.

Take that screenshot for example. I can find
anything in my bags very quickly because things are always grouped
together logically.

That said, AI is not for the faint of heart.
It's incredibly
time consuming to configure, and has a bad habit of not only getting
confused about where a particular item is supposed to go (sometimes
requiring you to either hand-edit or nuke your configuration to fix
it.) It's also one of the AddOns that can reportedly
cause the "block too big" memory
errors that will
bring WoW to a screaming (followed by flaming and violently exploding)
halt. Usually six seconds after you start a boss fight in an
instance.

I've found that using /reloadui
after each boss mitigates that.

So yes, it's finicky, and makes WoW somewhat unstable,
but that just gives you an idea of how unbelievably useful it is.

Beast
Training: basically an improved beast training
window that looks less like a trainer's list of skills and more like a
talent window.

Bookworm:
records any book (or plaque) that you read, and
where you read it. You can then go back and read them later
on. Gotta read 'em all!

Cartographer:
replaces the standard WoW map.
Among other things, it allows you to scale it, move it, show
unexplored areas, add notes, make it transparent, and more.
When combined with
Cartographer_Data,
Cartographer_Herbalism
and
Cartographer_Mining, it'll give you map locations for pretty much
every herb and mineral node in the game. Just like Gatherer,
except without the annoying "having to find everything" step.

However, also combine this with
Routes,
and you can build
up optimised mining/herbing routes for farming runs.

Clique:
I'm still adjusting to using this, but I use it on
my healery-type characters. It lets me, for example,
Shift+Click on someone to cast a full heal, Ctrl+Click to cast a HoT,
or Ctrl+Right Click to dispell. Pretty damn nifty.
That said, I do think I prefer mouse-over healing more (ie:
set up your healing spells to cast at your mouse over target) since it
allows me to not only heal people via unit frames, but I can also just
point at them in the game world to heal them.

EquipCompare:
when you mouse over something that's
equippable, it shows the tooltip for what you currently have
equipped next to it.

ExpressMail:
shift-click on a mail to loot an attached
item. Damn I love this thing. Tekkub rules.

GemHelper:
used on Por; lets you filter your gem list
based on colour, stats, quality, etc.

GemList:
one of those interactive "whisper me to search
for gems" dealies. That said, it doesn't look like it's
maintained any more, so you might want to try
CraftList2.

I Has Macro Lol:
basically, this addon rewrites a
particular macro slot depending on where you are. This is
hugely useful for daily quests. By dragging the IHML macro to
an action button (M2G18 in my case,) I can push that to take readings
in the Spirit Fields, drop bombs in Skettis, phase shift in BEM, or
plant the banner on IoQD.

Its' Happy Snaps: this basically takes a screenshot every
10% of a level, or when you ding a new level. I wrote it so
that I'd have a more complete history of my alts levelling up.
It's not published anywhere, but let me know if you're
interested and I'll toss it up somewhere.

LightHeaded:
basically, it's Wowhead's quest database, but
accessible in-game. Useful when you're on one of those quests
with really vague and obtuse instructions. Or, you know, ones
where the directions are just outright
wrong.

OPie:
this is a new addition to my UI.
Basically, I have it set up like so: I push a key
combination, and a ring of actions shows up around my cursor.
I flick my mouse towards the action I want, let go of the key
binding, and OPie executes that action. As an example, I used
to use the numpad for switching aspects which was a bad idea because it
requires me to remove my hand from the mouse to do it. Now, I
have them arranged in a ring bound to Ctrl+E, so I don't need to move
my hands. I'm still getting used to it, but it's very
promising at this point.

PallyPower:
obviously not visible in the screenshot for
obvious reasons, this lets you track and manage Pally blessings.
Por would have gone mad if not for this.

PetEmote:
because pets is peoples too. Note that you'll probably want
to re-write most of the emotes, since they're apparently translated
into English and as a result, most of them sound... wrong.

RatingBuster:
summarises the difference between the item
you're looking at and what you've got equipped.

Skinner:
no, not the principal. It's what gives
windows in WoW that nifty black gradient look.

TourGuide:
I have four 70s, two per faction.
I've done, basically, every soloable quest in the game.
Repeatedly. Levelling up is honestly nothing more
than a chore for me because I've done it all before.
TourGuide is fantastic because it boils levelling up down to
a list of "go here, do this" instructions that you can follow while
more or less unconscious. 'Tis brillig.

VisualHeal:
a little bar that shows incoming heals on you
and whoever you're casting a heal on; also shows what their estimated
health will be when the heal completes.

Thursday, 10 July 2008

Admittedly, it would
be a tad overpowered. I mean, that crappy pair of white
bracers I have would make excellent T7 tanking gear with all the bonus
stamina it'd have...

So in 24 hours, Porphyrria went from 65 enchanting to 250.
She'd been soloing lowbie instances for a while, and DE-ing
the drops, so she had tons of dusts and essences to play with.
That said, about half of the skillups came from buying stuff
off the AH. Farming for enchanting mats becomes progressively
less feasible the higher you get. Not simply because the
instances get harder, but because the drops get fewer and far between
in longer and more complex instances.

I tried running ZF for some mats the other day, and spent 70%
of my time chasing after casters. In ZF, they have this nasty
habit of running away at low health, but not coming back.
They just stay wandering around at extreme range,
occasionally casting at you. I once spent 20 minutes
searching for one mob that had glitched up to a high bit of static
geometry. Since it wouldn't come back like most mobs do when
they flee, even if it couldn't see me, it took another 5 minutes to
kill it. I couldn't really move on until I did because the
damn thing was keeping me stuck in combat.

In the end, it was easier to simply buy the mats off the AH,
or buy appropriately-levelled green gear off the AH and DE that.

As it stands, I need to get Por another 50 points in
Enchanting before she can DE the massive stockpile of ilvl 115+ greens
I have. That's a problem because those 50 points require 400
Dream Dust (oh, and 10 Greater Nether Essence.)

This is either going to take an awful lot of dungeon runs, or
a colossal number of monies.

That said, one good thing has come out of all this.
If you've ever tried to powerlevel enchanting, you know how
much of a pain it is.

Move to left side of screen, click "Enchant," move to right
side of screen, click item, move to top centre of screen, click "Yes."
Repeat until suicidal.

See, enchanters can't just queue up a dozen enchants, click
"Make" and then go off and craft a cup of coffee or a sandwich.
We have to do them one at a bloody time, repeatedly telling
the game that, yes, we really do want to enchant
that. YA RLY!

But I've found a way around it.

Macro the first: "Craft-It™"

/click
CraftCreateButton

Macro the second: "Yes, Damnit™"

/click
StaticPopup1Button1

Here's how you use them: put them both on buttons next to each
other. Open up the enchanting window, pick an enchant.
Now, enchant an item in your inventory. I'm not
100% on this one, so make sure you're enchanting an item that's already
enchanted; if it's not, enchant it once then do it again.
Click "Yes" when the dialog asks you.

Now, if you want to repeat
the enchant on the same item, press the first macro followed
immediately by the second. No need to pause or anything; drum
your fingers across if you like. The game will dutifully
repeat the enchantment you have selected on the last item you
enchanted, and dismiss the confirmation dialog without ever actually
showing it.

Now, you could probably
combine those two macros together by pasting the contents of the second
macro after
the contents of the first macro. The only reason I've used
two macros up there is because that's what I tested with, and didn't
think of combining them until two paragraphs ago.

When you've got to do 20 Greater Defense to Cloak enchants in
a row, those macros are a God-send.

P.S. This is my first attempt at using an SVG image.
There's a fallback for people using antiquated software
created back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Ansett was still in
the air (I'm
looking at you,
Internet Explorer!) Let me know if there are any issues.

Feed Your Reader

Who Is This Git?

I've been playing WoW on and off since December of 2004, with four level 70s, as well as a smattering of toons trapped in the hell that is the low- and mid-game. I'm mostly casual, and enjoy killing stuff, making stuff, and fishing for some reason.

Itsnoteasy — Beast Mastery Hunter

Porphyrria — Retribution Paladin

Speak To The Devil

If, for some reason, you have a mighty need to contact me, you can do so by using my email-style address:

That, or you can always send me a tell in-game if you really feel like it. Don't worry, I don't bite too hard...